


A Walk in The Woods

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Christmas, Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Grieving John, Nature, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-09-06 15:27:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8758441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: “If you are going through Hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the December 04, 2016 Watson's Woes WAdvent Calendar. **Suggested musical accompaniment for the reader** : Loreena McKennitt’s “[Snow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HT4dMXIr-o)” and/or John Denver’s “[Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsDEN-RBK3k).”

When my friend Colonel Hayter invited me to his Reigate home for a visit in early December of 1892, I was nearly prepared to turn him down. Fortunately he was wise enough to add that he had a few questions about his health, and wished to ask for my professional assessment of his state. When I finished reading his letter I almost smiled for the first time in weeks at the flimsiness of his request; he no doubt knew that a simple invitation to his estate would have been refused. But my duty stirred me to obey his summons.

 

Duty was my sole motivator in those bleak grey days. I had recently buried my beloved wife Mary, lost to a bout of influenza at the beginning of November. The mourning I had never truly ended for my beloved friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who had perished in May of the previous year, was now joined by my widower’s grief. My entire world seemed shrouded in grey.

 

 _Walk. Keep walking._ That was my plan. Walk through the pain, just as I had walked through heat and dust in Afghanistan. I could work, and others needed the work I did. That alone dragged me from my lethargic sleep on a sofa or day-bed, that was what made me force down more than a cup of tea, wash my face, don my black frock-coat and take up my bag, walk out into the icy world. _Serve them, as you failed to serve him. Help them, as you were unable to help her._

 

I walked the rounds of my medical practise, and walked back to the empty house in Kensington. I never walked past the empty rooms on Baker Street.

 

I was once called in by a distressingly solicitious Lestrade to assist with a murder; when I realised that the chief emotion I felt upon viewing the corpse was envy, I knew I needed a change to keep me alive this season. As a doctor I knew that a patient’s mental state could determine if he survived an illness or not; more than once I had seen melancholia turn a minor illness into a fatal one – and illness and winter go hand in hand. I had a duty to survive, for both of my lost loved ones; for I had promised myself that I would put spring flowers on Mary’s grave, and I would return to Switzerland (as I had this past May) to leave a pouch of pipe-tobacco at a particular scenic overview.

 

A change is as good as a rest, the saying goes. I took the change offered me by an old acquaintance.

 

Two days after receiving Hayter’s letter I was on a train to Surrey.

 

#

 

The Colonel welcomed me at the station with only a word and a handclasp. We travelled back to his house in silence, for which I was grateful; as I had observed from an earlier visit, Hayter had had much in common with Holmes, including not requiring chatter for its own sake.

 

When Holmes and I had visited Reigate before it had been late April. Now snow covered the grounds and trees of the countryside, marred only by the tracks of wildlife and the heavier footprints of pheasant hunters. The sky was the colour of buttermilk, with patches of heavy cloud promising more snow; the air was crisp and cold as a new-picked apple and stung my face where I sat in the dog-cart.

 

Dinner was the same sympathetic wordlessness. Hayter had never married, but his career as a soldier and his eventful past had made him no stranger to heartbreak and loss in his own life, and he was a perceptive man. The only communications were to thank the servers, and for Hayter to offer me a cigar at the meal’s end, which I accepted. (To this day I cannot recall what we ate; everything tasted of ashes.) We sat in his den, where that same silence reigned.

 

“It’s a hell of a thing,” was all he said over his brandy snifter. I nodded, my heart aching, and groped for the handkerchief in my sleeve as my tears rolled down unremarked.

 

When I awoke next morning I underwent what had become my routine battle to leave the bed and face another day; I won once again, and arose to wash and dress for breakfast.

 

Over our eggs and rashers, Hayter asked for a medical examination, and I agreed. The routine professional work was soothing, and I was able to pronounce my host as hale and hearty as a man could be who indulged in port and tobacco more than was strictly good for anyone (neither of which he planned to reduce). With that nominal purpose for my visit out of the way I was welcome to remain for the rest of the week, and I had the run of the house and grounds.

 

Snow was falling outside, as foretold by the heavy clouds from the day before; I therefore spent the day inside. I explored Hayter’s splendid library, and was amused to find it as well-stocked with dog-eared adventure stories and yellow-backed novels as with calf-bound classics; I spent the afternoon wrapped in a sea tale, my heart carried quite away from its pain; until I came to a passage I would have dearly loved to repeat aloud to Mary to make her laugh – and returned to myself with a jolt. I chastised myself bitterly for forgetting my loss, even for an hour.

 

At supper Hayter suggested a walk the next day (the snow having finished falling by then), and I agreed. The loss of my mindless, comforting work routine made it hard for me to formulate any plans of my own. I excused myself after the meal and retired to my room rather than join Hayter in the den again.

 

I sat at the desk provided, with paper before me and an inked pen in my hand. I had considered trying my hand at writing once more, but found myself staring at the blank expanse; the words that had once come so easily to me lay like dried pips in my brain, unable to come forth. I retired to bed.

 

#

 

Next morning the Surrey sky was bright blue, the landscape was pristine white, and the sun shone but gave no warmth; our breath smoked before us as Hayter and I walked across the fields, our feet crunching through the fresh snowfall.

 

I felt the country air, clear and sharp as an icicle, bury itself in my lungs with each inhalation and sting my cheeks. This was far removed from the murky sullen clinging cold fog of London. Everything was sharp and clear – the air, the landscape, the sounds of boughs cracking here and there, the few brave songbirds that remained. It seemed to pierce the grey shroud that covered my sensibilities. I was forced to look, truly look at everything, and see it.

 

“I love it here this time of year,” Hayter gestured at the wall of snow-cloaked trees at the far end of the meadow. “We can go shooting later if you like. Pop a partridge for dinner.”

 

I nodded again. I was relieved to have someone I trusted guiding me for the moment. I had enjoyed shooting when I was on holiday; perhaps I would again.

 

The Colonel was a man of action, as I had been, and loved the countryside. We walked for hours across the fields and through the small copses of trees that bordered the fields, and came back to the house for late afternoon tea. Ravenous for the first time in months, I devoured the food set before me, my cheeks still smarting from the cold. I retired to my room, worn from my long walk. I had some thought of taking a quick siesta.

 

I awoke in the pitch-black of middle night, disoriented; I had been more exhausted and sleepless than I had thought, and had slept straight through suppertime and the evening. I sat in the center of a pitch-black room, cold and close now that the fire had gone out. I was alone in a cold bed, completely alone. I felt entombed.

 

Despair enfolded me as tightly as a shroud. Was this how it felt to be squeezed to death by a boa constrictor?

 

I stumbled barefoot and nightshirt-clad to the window. Winter or no winter I wanted to open the window, frantic for air as if I’d been buried alive. I flung aside the curtains.

 

Light enveloped me, and I shut my eyes hard against the dazzling brightness after the pitch-black room. When I ventured to open my eyes again I was once again engulfed in silver blue. The moon was nearly full, and the entire landscape glowed.

 

I don’t know how long I stood at the icy window, staring. But when I did turn away it was to relight the candle and take up my trousers. Minutes later I was dressed, shivering in the flickering candle-light and close cold of the room. My soldier’s training had prepared me to be awake, clad and ready to move at a moment’s notice; it had stood me in good stead throughout my stay in Baker Street and had never deserted me. I wrapped a muffler round my throat and fastened my greatcoat, and took up the candle, collecting my walking-cane as I left the room.

 

The house was the same enveloping blackness, with the sullen close cold that had seeped in from the outside, defied only a little by the banked fires in the hearths of the main room and bedrooms. My friend and his servants were abed, and Colonel Hayter did not own any dogs; I was undisturbed as I went to the entrance.

 

When I opened the door silver light and biting cold struck me at the same time. One was pure beauty and the other was pure pain. Every part of me was awake and alive.

 

The bright moon in a black sky, reflecting the sun, itself cast reflection upon the snow till it was bright enough almost to read by. Here, unlike London, there was no yellowish-black fog to obscure the sky and smear the light to a dull glow. Stars spattered the edges of that black expanse, also clear and sharp as diamond shards.

 

I drew in breath like a knife in my lungs, and exhaled dragon-smoke. I left the dark close house and my solitary bed, and set off across the expanse of light. This time, unlike my crunching steps during the bright day, I set my boots to the ground as silently as possible, treading like a roe deer. These were the same grounds Hayter and I had crossed that day; they were transformed now into a strange landscape, as if I walked on the moon.

 

A shadow flew overhead, soundless; I stood and watched the owl’s shadow glide over the snow until the bird returned to the copse. I turned my own steps to a thicker cluster of trees at the opposite end of the meadow.

 

I did not completely enter the wooded area – the light vanished immediately when one went into the trees, and I did not want to turn my ankle by treading on unseen, uneven ground or stepping into a fox-hole. I stayed at the outskirts, still walking deerfooted.

 

I saw and observed everything that night. I held still, watching badgers emerge from a sett. I looked up the long slope of meadow, now marked with my footprints, the house out of sight. Another owl shadow stopped the moon for a moment. A far-off dog barked.

 

The cold did not slow me. It made me feel everything, burrowing straight into my aching heart. I witnessed this beauty and felt this pain.

 

_Holmes, look at that broken bush. Was it a foraging fox? A deer sharpening his antlers? A clumsy quail-hunter falling on it? What can you deduce, old friend?_

_Mary, dear. How bright and cold this night is. Do you remember the night we held hands outside of Mr. Sholto’s home? I will never forget that moment. I will never forget you, love._

 

My heart beat harder, stronger in the cold. I retained enough sense not to weep though my eyes stung and my pounding heart ached for it; this was no weather in which to wet my face.

 

Finally I turned my steps once again to the house. My grief had been equalised by the cold and the exertion; once I returned and was warm once again, I would collapse in exhaustion and sleep in blissful dreamlessness.

 

I could still experience beauty. I would hang on to that.

 

And I would keep walking.

 

***

 

I kept walking.

 

And another December visit took me back to the Colonel’s home, for another walk deep in the cold hours of night. I headed back across the snowy field, well-lit even by a mere half-moon, and just as bitingly cold. But my sorrow was halved, softened by time, and no longer squeezed me.

 

The man waiting at the edge of the copse in the same reverent silence for the beauty around us acknowledged my look with a nod of his own. We did not speak as we returned to Hayter’s, walking together.


End file.
